"I long for the days when school violence consisted of a brief altercation on the playground with fists ... Everybody walked away from those, maybe a little scuffed up, but alive."

"If people admit that they will have to admit that the system and we are failing our children. Most people would rather blame something or someone else rather that admit responsibility."

"His parents were enabling him, not stepping up and acting like parents."

"Have we allowed ourselves and our society to stray that far from civility?"

A) Your kids go to a school that is so politically correct that the kids will be EXPELLED for fighting. Do you think this helps or hinders bullying and intimidation problems? How do you think these rules will help or hinder the lives of your children ten years from now?

B) The system is not reponsible for your kids and their behavior. YOU* are responsible for their behavior. If YOU* don't like what they're being exposed to at their school, YOU* can remove them from the school and either put them in another school, a private school, or homeschool them. YOU* have options, but they take some thought, and probably more financial control than you're exerting now.

C) Most parent/child relationships have been reversed. The children are calling the shots, the parents obey.

D) The veneer of civilization we wear is so thin that it is virtually non-existent. We are the same people as the citizens of Rome fifteen centuries ago. In Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he cited laziness, softness, loss of civic virtue, and outsourcing their duties as some of the reasons for its downfall. Which of these do not apply to us as a country right now, and have for some time?

We have been trained, and trained well, not to think for ourselves, to do as we're told, to be good consumers (on credit), not to stand up for what we know is right, not to care about anything of an evil nature unless it is approaching our front door.

(*I refer to the editorial YOU, not the specific YOU.)

I suspect that the people who peruse this website, actively or anonymously, are those who either suspect or KNOW that all of this is wrong, and want to make some plan, and/or make some decisions that could possibly change their small part of their existance.

On a wholescale, countrywide scale, I think it is simply hopeless to expect. The avalanche has already begun.

Sue